Tag Archives: Amanda Cochrane

Wise Investments, and Other Notes from the State Senate Home Stretch

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As I have noted previously, 2024 has been a barn-burner of a time for state Senate fundraising. Thanks largely to the Barons of Burlington writing bushels of four-figure checks and Democratic donors striving to keep pace, a lot of money has gone into some potentially close Senate races.

Some candidates were clearly taken by surprise at the amounts raised, because they’ve got a lot left with precious little time to spend it. The result: Senate hopefuls have made a blizzard of mass media buys in the second half of October, even as statewide campaigns have seemingly ended major expenditures. (Since Phil Scott and John Rodgers made their big radio splurge on October 28, there have only been two mass media filings by statewide candidates, and they add up to less than $2,000.)

But the Senate, that’s a different story. The mass media reports continue to come flying in. Mostly. There have been no late spends in Franklin or Windham, where the incumbents are safe as houses. (Lamoille’s Richard Westman just rolled in on October 31 with $7,303 spent on postcards and online ads.)

At the other end of the scale we find two districts not known for high rollers: Caledonia and Orleans, where longtime Democrats Jane Kitchel and Bobby Starr are retiring and every major-party candidate has spent tens of thousands of dollars. The number-one late spender on our list: Rep. Katherine Sims of Orleans, with $16,417 spent on mass media since October 15. Her Republican counterpart, Samuel Douglass, has spent $4,705, so late spending in Orleans totals more than $21,000. In Caledonia, Democrat Amanda Cochrane has spent $11,242 while Republican Rep. Scott Beck has laid out $6,603, for a district total of nearly $18,000.

I guess there’s at least one economic sector booming in the Kingdom.

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The Barons of Burlington Are Trying to Buy the State Senate

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Pictured above is a curious sort of politician: He presents himself as a simple farmer, a rural populist who gives voice to the voiceless — meaning people who live outside the Burlington area. But John Rodgers, former Democratic state lawmaker turned Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, has seen his campaign picked up off the mat by major backing from Chittenden County elites. The Barons of Burlington, you might say.

These same people are writing batches of four-figure checks to a handful of Republican candidates for state Senate who have some chance of winning. The goal, clearly, is to kill the Democratic/Progressive supermajority in the Senate and end the truly historic string of veto overrides in the current biennium. It’s a longshot; the Republicans would need a net gain of four seats to end the supermajority. But if Rodgers wins, they’d only need three because the potential tie-breaking vote would be in their back pocket.*

*Correction: THe tie-breaking vote might be useful but not for veto overrides. If there’s a tie on an override, it’s already lost.

A few months ago, this Barons of Burlington thing was kind of cute. Like, can you really expect to swing an election with a sprinkling of large donations? Now, it’s looking like a serious, coordinated effort beyond anything I’ve seen in my 12+ years of walking this beat. I mean, all these people writing identical checks to the same handful of candidates? It’s beyond anyone’s notion of coincidence.

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So the VTGOP’s Big Plan Is… Try to Take Jane Kitchel’s Senate Seat? Is That It?

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Previously we looked at the dire financial straits of Esther Charlestin’s candidacy for governor, where she barely cleared $12,000 in a race that calls for, by Howard Dean’s reckoning, at least 164 times that much money. Now it’s time to look at the Republican side of the ledger, where pretty much everybody can rightly cry poverty.

With one notable exception.

That would be state Rep. Scott Beck, running for the Northeast Kingdom Senate seat currently occupied by retiring Democrat Jane Kitchel. Beck has raised a rather stunning $35,565. (His likely Democratic opponent, Amanda Cochrane, has raised a respectable $7,165 and enjoys Kitchel’s active support.) Beck appears to be the only Republican candidate who has raised more than enough money to run a respectable race. Besides, of course, Gov. Phil Scott, The Exception To Every Republican Rule,

More to the point, Beck and the governor are about the only two Republicans who aren’t complete embarrassments when it comes to fundraising. Which shows you just how desperate the party’s situation is.

The VTGOP ought to be in a position for a nice little comeback in the Legislature, threatening to end the Dem/Prog supermajorities that imperil every single one of Scott’s many, many, many vetoes. And they’re not.

Instead, the wistful eyes of the donor class have largely turned to putative Democrat Stewart Ledbetter’s bid to wrest away a Senate seat from liberal Democrat Martine Gulick or Progressive firebrand Tanya Vyhovsky. Ledbetter has amassed the largest campaign kitty of any Statehouse candidate thanks primarily to Burlington-area business leaders. You know, the very people who would historically be bankrolling Republicans.

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